Skeptico sums it quite nicely here:

http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2007/01/hornbeck_browne.html

It hurts my brain to think that people can still take her seriously. She’s a piece of garbage.

Bleh…I’m too angry to type any more.

Do the world a favor, Sylvia, just go away.

With the Democrats taking power in Congress, one issue sure to be on their agenda is a coming up with an energy policy that moves us away from fossil fuels. Currently, for the fiscal 2007 year, the United States is slated to spend $770 million dollars on research for renewable energy sources. Doesn’t sound like a lot of money to me for such an important problem, and that’s probably because the Republicans have only paid lip service to actually doing anything about our energy problems. However, don’t think the Democrats will change much either. They haven’t put a price tag on any plan yet. The one thing both Republicans and Democrats have in common, though, is that they both think only they can solve the problem. Them, the elected officials, the conceited anointed.

Let’s take a different approach. I found the website http://www.greentagsusa.org which allows one to calculate their own energy usage and buy “green energy”. The money goes towards building new clean energy supplies as well as new research. According to the website, the average American household uses 10,388 kWh of electricity per year. To offset this, it would cost $200.00 in “Green Tags” a year to even out the energy usage, or just $16.67 a month. There are currently around 110,000,000 households in this country. That means if everyone “greened” out their energy usage at only $16.67 a month, 22 billion dollars a year would go directly into building and researching green energy.

I don’t believe that we would ever get all 110,000,000 million people on board with this, but it would only take 3.8M households to equal what the current president is spending. We do need an energy plan, but don’t think it needs to come from government. We the people can do a lot ourselves.

For the third time in five years, I will be attending James Randi’s conference in Las Vegas called The Amaz!ng Meeting. This year’s topic is “Skepticism and the Media.” I addition to being biased and sloppy, the media tends to lack a skeptical point of view on outrageous claims. It was only last year that ABC’s Primetime Live wasted America’s time with an “investigation” about a supposed faith healer. The reporter, one John Quinones could be heard on Coast to Coast AM expressing his total belief in what amounts to the oft-debunked “psychic surgery.” Yet, in the year 2005, it was still a “news” story. We need skepticism in the media more than ever.

On a semi-related note, I registered as a “Bright”, on the official Brights website. I’d suggest checking it out, even if you don’t think you can participate. It would be nice to see how many critical thinkers this country really has.